Within colleges, Facebook has become a vital socializing tool. You can see who's in your classes (along with their picture, interests, favorite movies, books and music) before you even catch a glimpse of a syllabus.
What started as a purely collegiate experience, though, has evolved into a Myspace mini-me. Everyone can have a Facebook now - your mom, your butcher, even your friendly neighborhood stalker - and it just doesn't feel the same.
And why did Zuckerberg and Co. even feel the need to undergo such an expansion? Twenty-three-year-old Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook as a way for his fellow Harvard students to communicate with each other, and when the idea spread to universities across the world, it was genius. Unlike its creepier older brother, Myspace, Facebook felt private, at least, within your campus.
The change, surely, comes back to money. With its expansion, Facebook is catching up to Myspace in terms of advertising revenue. When it opened its doors to all ages, it underwent a booming growth, and a little bit of its magic died.
At least on Facebook, the profile page you put up is encouraged to represent you, whereas on MySpace, it's just as likely to stumble upon Omega's Squire, the Harbinger of Anarchy-Chaos's page as it is John Smith's.
Most of us have a Facebook or a Myspace. It's one of those strange predicaments - we can talk on and on about how annoying the site can be, how creepy the newsfeed has become and yet, we can't get enough of it. We use it to keep in touch with our long-lost friends from kindergarten, to find out about the lives of people we would never talk to in real life. We've forgotten what life is like without it.
Please, whatever you do, don't call us the Myspace generation.
Yes, many of us have Myspaces, but this blanket term is a bland generalization of a sprawling age bracket.
We use the internet for communication, for convenience and, yes, for goofing off during class or work. However, some of us are intelligent enough to realize these sites are little more to their creators than money-making tools, and that we shouldn't go too far with what we put our name and face on online.
We understand the risks and benefits of these Web sites, and it doesn't mean we're all careless, irresponsible children with no attention span and an unhealthy obsession with what the girl from our Biology class drank last night. Most of the time, anyway.
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